PolicyPak Browser Router: Ensure users utilize the RIGHT browser for the right website !

PolicyPak Browser Router: Ensure users utilize the RIGHT browser for the right website !

Everyone knows that not every browser is the right one for all websites. Problem is, users end up using the WRONG website most of the time. With PP Browser Router, you create policies (or ROUTES) where specific websites are launched only into the specific browsers. It couldn’t be easier. Check it out.

PolicyPak Browser Router: Ensure users utilize the RIGHT browser for the right website!

Hi, this is Jeremy Moskowitz, Group Policy MVP and founder of PolicyPak software. In this first video, I’m going to show you a gaggle of problems that you can fix using PolicyPak Browser Router.

Let’s start with a very simple one. I’m sure you’ve seen this. Your users launch Internet Explorer and they get asked this kind of annoying question right here, “Would you like to make Internet Explorer your default browser?” Maybe they say “yes”, maybe they say “no”. Then they go to another browser and what happens? It wants to be the default browser. So you say “yes” here and when you launch the first browser, you get asked yet again, “Do you want this to be the default browser?” So that’s problem number one that I want to show you how to solve.

Problem number two is, well, as you know, some web pages only get rendered correctly in the right browser. So let me show you an example of what I mean. Now, these webpages that I’m about to show are actually kind of fine. Typically, the problems are the things that you have internally or you use with your vendors. But if I were to go to right here and I were to create a couple of links, aaa.com, bbb.com, ccc.com and ddd.com. So these are real webpages. They would exist right now, but the problem is, every single one you would click on, if you were to get these in email or click on Skype, well, they’re all going to launch in whatever the default browser is. And maybe that’s not what you want. As you can see the default browser is still Firefox. And if I change it to Internet Explorer then say “yes” you want this to be the default browser, then now all the websites go to the default browser. And that might not be what you want either.

What you want to do is route the right URL to the right website. And that is what Browser Router does. So I’m going to show you very quickly how you can set up a quick route using Browser Router. And you can do it very quickly using Group Policy.

So for my West Sales users, I’m going to create a GPO and link it here called “Route for my West Sales users”. Using Browser Router, I’ll just go ahead and click “edit”. You can do this either on the computer side or the user side. I’m going to do it under user side PolicyPak. Then click on “Browser Router”. Now, all Browser Router routes must be contained in what’s called a collection. And a collection is just simply a way to kind of contain them altogether. So if I want to call this “for my West Sales users”, I can just double-click this and now create the route. So I’m going to add a new – well, let’s first just set the default browser. Let’s get that part handled and out of the way. Let’s just say, no matter what happens, if we don’t make any route, we’ll just say that everything must go through Internet Explorer. That seems like a pretty reasonable thing to do. Then we can add a new policy or a new route. Maybe we want to say – we’ll just give it a name like AAA and the URL specifically could be www.aaa.com. And in that case, maybe we want to always go to Internet Explorer. So we’re routing www.aaa.com directly Internet Explorer.

We can also use a new policy type and call this maybe “All B’s to Firefox” and create a wildcard entry. And you’ll just do *bbb* and route it directly to Firefox. So now if it has anything with bbb in the name, boom, it will go right to Firefox.

Let’s create another policy route. And we’ll call this “All C’s to Chrome” and we’ll create a wildcard here, *ccc* and we can go right to Chrome.

Now, there are other ways to use this, of course. You can use regular expression. We’ll validate those for you. And you can pick a particular internet security zone. If you’re interested, you can do say all the local internet sites would go to Internet Explorer and all the internet sites would go to say Firefox. You could do that if you wanted to. I’m not going to demonstrate that now, but it gives you an idea of things you can do. I’ll go ahead and click “okay” here.

So that’s it. I’ve set up my routes; aaa to go to Internet Explorer, bbb to go to Firefox and all C’s to go to Chrome. And that’s it. So if I go over to this endpoint machine and run GP Update, I’ll wait for Group Policy to finish and that’s it. So all we’re going to do – go ahead and close this out. First thing we’ll do is just click on aaa.com. This should just go to the default browser and that’s going to be Internet Explorer and that’s exactly what it does. So now if we click on bbb.com, we said that should be Firefox. So when we launch it, boom, there we go. There’s Firefox. And if we were to go to ccc.com, we said that’s Chrome. Let’s go ahead and see what happens there. And sure enough, there’s Chrome.

And lastly, well, we have nothing for ddd so that’s not set up at all. So let’s go ahead and click on it. And therefore, it should go back to the default browser, which is Internet Explorer. And that’s exactly what happens.

Now, what I just showed you is awesome. When the links come in through, like I said, email, Skype or if they are embedded in documents. What if you’re already in a browser? What if you’re already in Internet Explorer and you’re user mistypes and makes – they should be using the right browser for the right browser for the right website, but they don’t know which one it is. We have that problem handled. Let’s say they go to bbb.com. Now, that’s not going to render perfectly in Internet Explorer. That’s supposed to be the right browser for Firefox. No problem. We just automatically launch Firefox for you. What’s that? They need to go back to aaa.com? No problem. We’ll automatically launch the right browser for the right route.

Same thing here. We’re in this browser and we need to go to ccc.com and that’s best for Chrome. No problem. We’ll launch Chrome there as well. And if you’re in Chrome and you need to go back to Firefox, no problem, pick the right browser for the right route and it will automatically appear and so on and so forth. And you can see it will just go from any browser to any browser based on the route. It is as simple as that.

So let’s go ahead and show how this works also in Windows 10. Now, all three of the normal browsers will work perfectly in Windows 10 and we’re also working on edge support. So stay tuned for that. So by way of example, if you are in Chrome right now and you meant to go to bbb.com, which of course is going to load best in Firefox. No problem. We’ll automatically route from Chrome to Firefox for you. And if you’re in Firefox and you need to go to aaa.com, okay, well, what are we going to do? We’re going to automatically launch the right browser for you there as well.

What I didn’t show you is that multiple tabs will work just fine. So for instance, you can see this tab is here. If I were to go to bbb.com, we’ll leave the right tab there and open up another browser for you, the correct browser, leaving the right tab in place.

And that’s it. That’s Browser Router 101. I hope that gives you enough of a taste for now. There are, in fact, lots more tips, tricks and techniques you can use Browser Router for, but that should give you a taste to see if you want to give it a shot.

Thanks for watching. And if you are looking to get a trial, come to the webinar. And then after the webinar, you’ll be able to download this yourself and give it a shot. Thanks so much for watching. And watch the next video. Thanks.